Contributors

Saturday, October 24, 2009

Easier to shout "neocon" than to engage in honest debate

Certainly the lazy use of "neocon" as a cover-all term of abuse and self-sufficient "argument" by members of the Left really pisses me off.

Over at The Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan has been debating the United Nations's Goldstone report on war crimes committed in Gaza (whose critics, including the State Department, say it was unfairly hostile to Israel) and the fallout from thisNew York Times opinion piece, in which a founder of Human Rights Watch denounces the group for having "written far more condemnations of Israel for violations of international law than of any other country in the region."

In the Times editorial, Robert L. Bernstein points out that "Col. Richard Kemp, the former commander of British forces in Afghanistan and an expert on warfare, has said that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in Gaza 'did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare.'" Noah Pollak also pointed to Kemp's testimony, which was made on behalf of the group UN Watch (though it wasn't first time he has defended the tactics of the IDF). In response to these two invocations of Kemp, Sullivan responds with an attack on the group that hosted him:

For a little background on this neutral observer, here's the Wikipedia entry on UN Watch, the hard neocon group Kemp is representing.